Election Investigations Guidebook timeframe.328 Hence, the ECC was unable to operationalize these core functions so close to the elections and struggled to inform the public, other election bodies, candidates, and party agents throughout the country of the policies and procedures in place for filing complaints, conducting investigations, and resolving claims.329 With thousands of complaints filed, the system partially collapsed under pressure—the ECC was forced to deviate from approved procedures and excluded an unnecessarily large number of polling stations from the count. Discretionary funding is necessary to ensure that an investigative body is sufficiently staffed with competent investigators. Such funding allows an investigative body to maintain autonomy and independence. During the 2011 Nigerian general elections, the under-funded Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) struggled to organize the staffing necessary to investigate over 870,000 cases of detected multiple registrations. As a result, only 270 cases were investigated and subsequently prosecuted by INEC.330 Training and Professional Development To develop professional institutions and ensure that investigations are held to the highest standards of competence, the institution that has subject-matter jurisdiction for investigating electoral complaints and irregularities must plan and implement training programs for investigators, including both permanent and ad hoc staff. Training should focus on subject matters associated with electoral investigations, such as candidate registration, campaign finance, voter registration, polling and Election Day violations, and counting irregularities. As with other stakeholders involved in the dispute resolution process, training programs for investigators should introduce key international principles for election complaints adjudication and should seek to impute a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the electoral dispute resolution process and the current status of legislation and regulations.331 A robust and comprehensive training program for staff, tailored to their responsibilities, could help strengthen the competence of investigators as well as 328 IFES, Afghanistan Electoral Integrity Assessment Final Report 63 (May 2013) (unpublished report) (on file with IFES). 329 Id. at 66. 330 The INEC detected 870,000 multiple registrations out of 73.5 million voters registered for the 2011 elections. See Festus Okoye, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), The Prosecution of Electoral Offenders in Nigeria: Challenges and Possibilities 2 (2013), http://library.‌fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/nigeria/10405.pdf; Nigeria: Pass Bill to Prosecute Electoral Offenses, Human Rights Watch (Mar. 3, 2011), http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/13/nigeria-pass-bill-prosecute-electoral-abuses. 331 102 See generally GUARDE, supra note 1.